trembled lest he should be forced to admit that, after all, Pope and Shaftesbury were sound in their optimism. But his satire probed the insufficiency of mankind in place after place, and there gradually rose in Swift, like an intoxication, a certainty of the vileness of the race. When he was quite convinced, madness was close upon him, but in the interval he wrote that sinister and incomparable masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, in which misanthropy reaches the pitch of a cardinal virtue, and the despicable race of man is grossly and finally humiliated. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born at 7 Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the Jonathan 30th of November 1667. He was the posthumous son of Jonathan Swift, younger (1667-1745) Swift son of Thomas Swift, vicar of Good rich, near Ross, in Herefordshire, mother's side. Temple was now retired from diplomacy to his house, Moor Park, Farnham; he does not seem to have discovered that his amanuensis was a man of genius. In May 1694 Swift left Temple in a fit of sudden anger, passed over into Ireland, and in October was ordained deacon; he took priest's orders in the following January. His quarrel with his kinsman and patron was, however, healed, and after an absence of exactly two years Swift returned to Moor Park. This was the approximate date of the first of Swift's mysterious relations with women; he left behind him in Ireland a "Varina" (Miss Waring), with whom he was in passionate correspondence. It is believed that Swift's second period of residence at Moor Park was happier than the first, and that Temple learned to value his strange inmate. Those who have condemned Sir William have perhaps forgotten how much there was in his agreeable and cultivated conversation which must have been far more attractive to Swift than what most country houses at that day could afford him. We find the latter already an invalid, but trying to combat ill-health by violent daily exercise. He was isolated; "I am often," he says, "two or three months without seeing anybody besides the family," but one member of this was Esther Johnson, the celebrated "Stella." Early in 1699 Temple died, and Swift sincerely mourned his loss. Meanwhile, in the retirement and obscurity of Moor Park, Swift had composed some astonishing things-the Tale of a Tub in 1696, the Battle of the Books in 1697; his stiff attempts at the Pindaric Ode were earlier. He had been reading history and the classics with extreme eagerness and fulness. He was now in his thirty-second year, with a small inheritance from Temple, but with no |